1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to an improved data processing system and method. More specifically, the present application is directed to selecting a number of processors to run an application effectively while saving power.
2. Background of the Invention
Most modern data processing systems consume power whether they are running a computational intensive application or are mostly idle. While power conservation may be a concern in today's society, many data processing system users are more concerned with performance over power consumption. In order to improve the performance of a data processing system, some of the most popular programming techniques make use of multiple processors to achieve higher throughput. Very often, operating systems and/or applications will make use of all the processors, physical and logical, on a data processing system to hopefully achieve the best performance of the data processing system. However, while making use of all of the processing resources of a data processing system may result in the best performance of the system in some cases, there are other cases where using all of the processing resources of a data processing system is not as advantageous.